A Disposition or a Program

I probably agree with Glenn Beck on at least two out of three policy
points. He does a lot of good when he gets tens of thousands of people
to finally pick up a copy of Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom.
And yet, when I listen to him -- or other popular icons of the activist
right, such as Sarah Palin or Mark Levin -- there's a dissonant
undercurrent that makes it impossible for me to embrace them. It runs
deeper than policy disagreements: I'm not a "moderate Republican" and I
don't ally myself with the Olympia Snowes of the world. It's something
more fundamental.

Conservatism proper is a disposition. It's a tradition that
runs through Socrates, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke,
Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, and Thomas Sowell.
These men disagree on as much as they agree on, but there's a common
current that runs through their thought: it is skeptical, wary of
claims to alter or improve the human condition, and -- as David Frum
brilliantly describes Kirk's thought -- offers us a vision, not a
program.

Sarah Palin, Mark Levin, and their allies offer us a program. Levin's manifesto Liberty and Tyranny,
for instance, begins with a bullet-point agenda of what constitutes
conservatism in the year 2010, complete with demands concerning taxes,
immigration, and the welfare state. It's incredible that anyone could
miss the point so utterly. How did conservatism, which positioned
itself as an anti-ideological strain of thought, transform into a
bullet-point ideology ready to cast out anyone who isn't a True
Believer?

Russell Kirk aptly described ideology as a drug. Meditate on that.
Ideology, in the classical conservative worldview, is something that
provides a person with a comfortable, affixed set of dogma that serves
itself, rather than the interests of the individual and his community.
Traditional conservatives, skeptical that anyone can really remake
society from on high, want to pierce through these absolute claims, not
come up with their own. Those who want to examine their beliefs ought
to act as Socrates did, asking questions even about those beliefs that
are taken as axiomatic.

Edmund Burke lambasted Thomas Paine's incredible pretensions that we
can "start the world anew." We can't make the world anew. We can't
remake society from on high. We can't fix the troubles of the human
condition with a bullet-point agenda.

Electricity bills are confusing, and don't arrive until long after the damage is done. The fix to a system that's high in both costs and headaches lies in connecting consumers to their consumption--show people what they're using in real time, and make it easy to compare costs to kilowatts. Geoffrey Gagnon